Current Status

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Not the kind with videos, no. This week my pc was acting wonky, chugging when it shouldn't have, plus the internet connection had turned south. I'm talking 1 to 2 kb per second south. The problem turned out to be several things at once! Our wireless router was biting the dust, the internet lines out here are being upgraded, and my compy had a few trojans on it. So after much teeth gnashing, some phone calls, some virus scans, it's all back to normal now.

So the rest of the week I spent prototyping an rpg/puzzle, or puzzle/rpg, whatever. More details on that later.

Also, I picked up one of the Sega Genesis collections through steam, there were a few games from the Shining series in there that I never got to play. Focusing on Shining in the Darkness at the moment. I still find that type of thing enjoyable, my only real gripe is that the labyrinth can spit monsters at you every step sometimes. Ha, this old stuff doesn't hold your hand either! No map, no mercy, few details about your quest. Who knew I had to clobber a giant effing crab(who will stomp your ass flat) to progress the story!? I actually looked that up to make sure, now that I have a grasp of how the game is set up, I'll hoof it from here. I managed to memorize the layout of the first floor, but some of the others I take the "lets go left/right at every turn" approach. Good times.

Friday, March 11, 2011

After being down for a week due to a damned ear infection, I began work on changing the look of the Backyard Ninja Design site. It's pretty much done and I'm pretty happy about how it looks. Thanks to Jason Campana, he simply suggested I go with a white background after looking at it in progress, and the end result started trickling in.

Now I want to talk a little about The Great White Destroyer demo.

As some of you may know, it constitutes half the game content. This originally sprang from my own experience with demos, my knee jerk "Only a few stages, come on!" reaction. I fear this was a mistake, as the player may be satisfied with the experience due to consuming so much of the content.

Half a meal versus a little taste. What would excite you more?

So I'm reworking the demo to make it shorter. The player will have access to 3 stages from destroyer mode, 3 from manatee. They can't post scores to the online table, and achievements are locked out. You can still get them but they won't show up unlocked. Most of me loathes this change, but I need to develop a business side for this to work right.

So next week I'll be testing this new demo build to make sure it's less bugs, then I'll be making some changes to The Great White Destroyer site. I can't wait until this is all wrapped so I can get back to developing Snowball!